Patrick Stewart Boldly Goes There

When “Star Trek: The Next Generation” premièred, in 1987, a newspaper referred to its leading man as an “unknown British Shakespearean actor.” Patrick Stewart was already forty-seven and had spent fourteen years as a full-time member of the Royal Shakespeare Company. But he had known nothing like the fame that playing Jean-Luc Picard—captain of the U.S.S. Enterprise and model of enlightened masculinity—would soon bring him. When he showed up on set the next day, a castmate had taped a sign on his trailer door that read “BEWARE: UNKNOWN BRITISH SHAKESPEAREAN ACTOR.”

Stewart is now eighty-three, having spent nearly half his life as Jean-Luc Picard, and he’s been reflecting on the unlikely trajectory that brought him from an impoverished childhood in the North of England to the final frontier. As a boy in Mirfield, an industrial town in Yorkshire, he had no hot running water, refrigeration, or toilet in his house. “Mirfield boys like me weren’t expected to have lofty ambitions. Certainly none that would ever take me into outer space,” he writes in his new autobiography, “Making It So.”

“I am in unknown territory,” Stewart told me recently. “I’ve never written anything before, other than maybe a two-hundred-word introduction or a thank-you letter.” He was in a sitting room in a hotel in Manhattan, where his third wife, the musician Sunny Ozell, was topping off his coffee. Stewart had been asked to write his life story before, but he always declined. “I never had the time to do it. But then my agent, early in 2020, said, ‘Look, Patrick, there is no work. It’s going to be a shut down everywhere, and it could last for months. This is the only window, so why not give it a go? If it doesn’t work out, we’ll just return the advance, and you can go back to doing jigsaw puzzles.”

As Stewart spoke, his sonorous voice filled the room, and his thick eyebrows—which seem magnified, being the only visible hair on his head—danced above his eyes. Stewart is a born storyteller, as anyone who has seen him perform his solo stage version of “A Christmas Carol” can attest. I first met him thirteen years ago, when he was acting in the David Mamet play “A Life in the Theatre” and met me in his dressing room, for a Talk of the Town interview about some of the unknown British stage actors with whom he had worked early in career. I remember sitting spellbound, asking questions that were answered with long, luxurious monologues, rich with reminiscence. That’s the feeling I got while reading “Making It So,” and again when we talked last month. (In deference to the SAG-AFTRA strike, we discussed “Star Trek” only in the context of his memoir.) Our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, covers his lifelong fascination with Shakespeare, his encounters with rock stars and Old Hollywood royalty, and getting high—in more ways than one.

Your whole life is so vividly remembered, going back to your early childhood. As you were writing, did you need to do anything special to conjure the detail? Did you have to do research into yourself?

A kind of research, Michael. I hadn’t read many memoirs, two or three perhaps. I’m a great novel lover. I’ve been passionate about books since I was five or six years old and was introduced to the local library in my small town in the North of England. We had no television in my house. We had no record player. All we had was BBC Radio. And so I used the library as my source of not just entertainment but also education as I got older. My education was very basic, and for years I felt uncomfortable about that, when I found myself working with Oxbridge men and women and so forth.

For a couple of days before I began writing, I just let what memories that I had of my early life [come]. Let me start at the beginning of the story and set a scene, which may take a lot of people somewhat by surprise, to find that I grew up in the relative poverty that I did. We lived in a house called a one-up, one-down, where there was one room downstairs, one room upstairs, and the front door opened onto a cinder yard. When I was a child, it was occupied by myself and my older brother, Trevor, and my gorgeous, kind, sweet, loving, funny mother. The first five years of my life were bliss. Heaven on a stick!

By opening up those doors, things trickled and then ended up flooding in.

One of your earliest memories is when you encountered your first peach. Can you tell me what happened?

My father had come home from war in 1945. He came home in uniform, and he kept his uniform for a long time. We had very simple holidays. We would go either to the North sea towns or to the west side of the U.K., facing the Irish Sea: Morecambe, Blackpool. We were in Blackpool walking along the promenade—my father, my brother, my mother, and me—and we went past a fruit-and-vegetable store. My father peeled off, and then in a few minutes came back with his hands behind his back and said to me, “Patrick, close your eyes and hold out your hand.” And something was put into my hand which I didn’t like the feeling of at all. I thought it was a creature or something. And I pulled my hand away. My father yelled at me, “Don’t do that!” I opened my eyes and found that it was a fruit I’d never seen before, which was now smashed on the sidewalk. And my father hit me. I think it was the only occasion he actually hit me. He was a hitter, but I think that was the only time. So I have always associated that fruit with that moment, an embarrassing and uncomfortable moment. There were actually many. I got used to them.

You write, “It’s taken me decades of analysis, beginning in the late 1980s, to understand and cope with the impact of the violence, fear, shame, and guilt I experienced as a child.” What did you come to understand about why your father was behaving the way he was?

When I was growing up, I never talked about my background, because I was so embarrassed. Our neighbors knew what my father could do and would do, and they were well aware of the shouting and yelling that he produced. Somebody—I think it might have been my doctor—said, “It’s very likely that your father is suffering from shell shock.” Well, they didn’t treat for shell shock in those days. A few years ago, the BBC asked me to do that show “Who Do You Think You Are?” On that program, there was an historian who specialized in medical conditions brought about by being in the military, and he told me that there is no doubt whatsoever that my father had suffered from P.T.S.D. Well, there was no P.T.S.D. back in the nineteen-forties. So my father was sick, and it was the sickness that made him lose control as he did. He was a “weekend alcoholic.” Friday evening, he began drinking, and that went through until Sunday evening. Those were the times when he was dangerous to be around.